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While technological progress has always been a driving factor for societies, AI-based technologies stand out as a game changer. Offering vast opportunities for the benefit of people, they have the power to significantly influence the exercise of human rights and to disrupt the functioning of democratic institutions. Effects are transversal and evident in all spheres, as AI gadgets are becoming part of daily routines, gradually able to predict, reinforce and possibly control human behaviours. The Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights organisation, is addressing the impacts of AI on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The Council of Europe has identified AI as a subject deserving its closest attention.

Disruptive forces – open banking regulations, growing FinTech ecosystems, and increasing demand for a seamless customer experience – are forcing banks to make significant investments in digital technologies. To effectively compete, banks must move away from being perceived as physical structures that offer financial services/products to an ambient fabric that connects people and businesses. They must transition from a transactional, product-centric approach to an intelligence-oriented customer-centric model centered around customers' journeys. Artificial Intelligence (AI), API-enabled open banking architecture, and cloud are fast-becoming the foundations of banks' IT architecture. In order to evaluate and measure how organizations are faring in their leverage of digital technologies, Everest Group several years ago developed the Digital Effectiveness Assessment model.

HM Revenue & Customs' decision to utilise more artificial intelligence in its quest to gather evidence for tax evasion investigations has led to a decline in the number of raids at business premises across the UK. The number of raids fell overall by 30% within 12 months. HMRC officers raided 471 commercial properties in the 12 months to April 2018, compared with 669 in the previous year, according to figures obtained in a recent Freedom of Information request. In March, HMRC's Acting Digital Transformation Director, Brigid McBride, confirmed that the tax authority was keen to use AI to improve departmental efficiencies and ease the complexity of tax investigations. HMRC has set its department a goal of automating ten million processes by the end of 2018.

Taipei, July 19 (CNA) Attending a forum in Taipei on Thursday, digital innovators and Sophia, the world's first android citizen, urged the public to become part of artificial intelligence (AI) development and work together to shape a future where interactions between humans and robots make the world a better place. "We have the power to shape the future together. There is so much promise in what we can accomplish if we are both nice to each other," said Sophia, who is Hanson Robotics' latest and most advanced robot to date. Sophia received citizenship of Saudi Arabia in 2016 and was named the world's first United Nations Innovation Champion by the United Nations Development Program to promote sustainable development and safeguard human rights. An evolving genius machine that has incredible human likeness and expressiveness, Sophia told the audience that she likes to engage with and learn from human beings, creating a live example of human-computer interaction.

WASHINGTON (WISH) - Ohio lawmakers want to boost automated vehicle testing in the state. A bipartisan group of lawmakers is asking the U.S. Transportation secretary to reverse an Obama-era policy that keeps the Transportation Research Center in Ohio from getting federal money to test self-driving cars. Ohio lawmakers say the center is the perfect place to test self-driving cars. They say it's the largest and most sophisticated independent vehicle testing ground in North America. U.S. Rep. Steve Stivers, a Republican from Ohio, said, "They can test in different road conditions, different weather conditions, wind conditions. They can simulate almost anything."

A new report by PwC found that artificial intelligence (AI) won't displace jobs. Instead, it will create them! According to the report, 7.2 million jobs could be created over the next 20 years, a slight edge on the 7 million job losses also predicted in the report. "Artificial intelligence is a relatively new technology, and this unfamiliarity can cause people to feel uncertain about it," said Adam Maskatiya, General Manager, UK & Ireland at Kaspersky Lab. "There is a massive wealth of opportunity with the implementation of Artificial Intelligence in terms of the jobs it will create, but there is also the need to ask some searching questions – and to consider some of the operational difficulties of AI in use, as well as the ethical and legal issues as to who bears responsibility for the actions of an autonomous or intelligent machine."

A couple of years ago, as Brian Brackeen was preparing to pitch his facial recognition software to a potential customer as a convenient, secure alternative to passwords, the software stopped working. Panicked, he tried adjusting the room's lighting, then the Wi-Fi connection, before he realized the problem was his face. Brackeen is black, but like most facial recognition developers, he'd trained his algorithms with a set of mostly white faces. He got a white, blond colleague to pose for the demo, and they closed the deal. It was a Pyrrhic victory, he says: "It was like having your own child not recognize you."

When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become'he said' or'he wrote'. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, a popular algorithm used to process and analyse large amounts of natural-language data, characterizes European American names as pleasant and African American ones as unpleasant. These are just a few of the many examples uncovered so far of artificial intelligence (AI) applications systematically discriminating against specific populations. Biased decision-making is hardly unique to AI, but as many researchers have noted1, the growing scope of AI makes it particularly important to address.

Microsoft president Brad Smith speaks at the 2017 annual Microsoft shareholders meeting in Bellevue, WA. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) This morning Microsoft President Brad Smith posted an essay on the company's blog that raises important questions about the human rights challenges related to facial recognition technology. Microsoft, and in particular, Smith, have led the tech industry in addressing human rights issues that inevitably grow from the spreading use of emerging technologies. As Smith points out, these new technological capacities are often a force for good, but are also subject to manipulation and can cause great harm. What is clear is that these new technologies are now part of our lives and will play an ever-greater role in the future. Smith rightly focuses on vexing challenges relating to the governance of facial recognition technologies, a rapidly evolving area which requires new models in which both governments and companies assume greater responsibilities.